Correction: Cell was ahead of it's time when they started drafting the concept for it in mid-2000 and the most powerful consumer CPU at the time was the Pentium 3, but by the time it launched on the market in 2005, X86_64 was the new undisputed king of CPU performance and ARM in mobile lower power sectors, with ATI and Nvidia leading the GPU race, leaving the Cell processor as an overpriced paperweight that was a jack of all trades, master of none and difficult to program to boot, and the new market had no use for such a thing.
I think neither Sony nor anyone else expected the consumer CPU and GPU industry to evolve so quickly in that time, otherwise they would not have spent hundreds of millions developing anew architecture from scratch. Intel also made the same mistake back then when they tried to reinvent the industry with the new Itanium CPU architecture. Hindsight 20/20.
Those years were indeed wild for tech progress. You bought a new CPU, suddenly two years later you have 64 bit CPUs as the new thing. You then bought a 64 bit CPU to be like the cool kids and suddenly dual core CPUs are all the rage.
I think neither Sony nor anyone else expected the consumer CPU and GPU industry to evolve so quickly in that time, otherwise they would not have spent hundreds of millions developing anew architecture from scratch. Intel also made the same mistake back then when they tried to reinvent the industry with the new Itanium CPU architecture. Hindsight 20/20.
Those years were indeed wild for tech progress. You bought a new CPU, suddenly two years later you have 64 bit CPUs as the new thing. You then bought a 64 bit CPU to be like the cool kids and suddenly dual core CPUs are all the rage.